


I Know That She Cares About Me- I Heard Her Call My Name

by HarveyWallbanger



Series: Peel Slowly and See [1]
Category: Constantine (TV)
Genre: Anxiety, Depression, Drug Use, Gen, Hospitals, Injury, Magic and Science, Medication, Unhealthy Relationships, abuse by care-givers, generally disturbing, hallucination, misuse of medication
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2015-05-02
Updated: 2015-05-02
Packaged: 2018-03-26 17:37:44
Rating: Mature
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 4,559
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/3859063
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/HarveyWallbanger/pseuds/HarveyWallbanger
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>Deep down, your blood and bones know what's to come.  It's a shame that they don't share that information with the rest of you.</p>
            </blockquote>





	I Know That She Cares About Me- I Heard Her Call My Name

**Author's Note:**

> This is an unpleasant story; if you think something in it might bother you, please don't read it. Take care, Dear Readers.  
> The title of the story comes from the song, I Heard Her Call My Name, by the Velvet Underground. I am not involved in the production of Constantine, and this school is not involved in the production of Constantine. No one pays me to do this. Do not try any of this at home. Thank you, and good night.

When he was nineteen, after a lifetime of searching, Ritchie discovered magic. A childhood spent reading fantasy and science fiction novels, books of legends, books about the paranormal and the hard sciences- drawn-out quests and lightning-strike insights- left him with the impression that it would come to him, that he had to wait for it. If he'd been a bit younger, he would have been checking the yard for owls. It seemed like something you had to somehow earn. Much later, the words printed on a ribbon of cigarette smoke, with a disdainful snort, John Constantine would inform Ritchie that magic was easy, and in fact, any cunt could do it. Of course, John was wrong. Ritchie ached to say so, but held his tongue. He felt as though his insides were stuffed with tissue paper- stiff with fullness- as he realized that to object would just be too much for him. Saying too much, feeling too much, giving too much away. The thought of talking about magic, its ways and its interiors, the things he'd explored and come to know, was just far too much, so he frowned silently, as everyone around him nodded sagely or laughed or looked scandalized. You couldn't force it, Ritchie had learned. You had to be in the right place. You had to inhabit the right part of your reality. Your life was a globe, and you had to move from one location to another. You had to board a train. You had to buy a ticket. You had to pack your bags. You had to wave a white handkerchief at all of those who had assembled to see you off.  
He was nineteen. He was finally in the right place.  
The books of his childhood- that hinted at grand things but never delivered, were too simplistic or too dry- began to fail him in his early adolescence. Thankfully, around the time that he was fogging up his glasses with huffs of frustration, the internet was going from bare nerve to a rudimentary intelligence. When he looked up and took notice, he found it an amazing thing to watch. Though he was sure that he was arriving late to the party and had missed something truly spectacular, he was thankful to be aware at all of what was happening at that moment. His years of futilely typing into search engines 'witchcraft' or 'magic' or 'magick' finally- finally!- yielded some appreciable results. It was actually fortunate that he was as old as he was. At nineteen, he wasn't precisely a grown-up, but he was grown up enough to know how to use information. Like anything else in nature, it's all valuable; some of it might be poisonous, but even that can help you, if you know how to handle it.  
He's nineteen. And he's. Young. So young, and so willing. So, so willing. For anyone and everyone. To lay it on him. Of course, it's laughable to him, now, with all he's lived through, since- But it's wrong to laugh. In his heart, he envies his nineteen-year-old self. It took so little to delight him. So little to make him happy.  
He was so happy. Those were the richest, most satisfying days of his life. Pleased to spend most of his free time in front of the computer, hours of reading about everything from kitchen witchery to ceremonial magic. Dozens of color correspondence charts. Recipes with unobtainable ingredients. Scans of alchemical texts. Dubious rituals. It didn't matter. Now, he didn't have to spend so much time in bookstores and libraries. (He continued to spent a lot of time in them, anyway.)  
A little bit later, when he catches hold of a golden thread of insight, he goes down, deep down. Into the myths he's been turning over since childhood; into versions he didn't know existed, in nearly-forgotten books on the mystery religions of ancient Greece. Into the gods of ancient Egypt. Into runes. On a lark, he learns Latin- swearing over Wheelock's at a coffee shop, with a cigarette and an Americano. Then, hieroglyphs, both Egyptian and Mayan. Oh, how he wants to know.  
To know what?  
To know everything, of course.  
He gets his degree, in Computer Science. Whether it's letters or numbers or switches, a language is a language. There's a language, he's sure, bigger than all of the others, linking everything together. He's young enough to believe that this is an original thought.  
He's twenty-five. And six months. He's twenty-five, and he has a Master's degree by then. He's slowly grinding his way to a doctorate. He's a real person. He's not an unformed creature, waiting to imprint on the first warm thing it encounters. He's not some infatuated devotee. The rumors reach others, but they don't reach him. In his solitary pursuits, he's insulted from the talk in town. John Constantine remains unknown to him. Until he becomes known. But up until that point, Ritchie would like to stress, he was a real person. There is some knowledge that warps you; changes you down to your component parts. Ritchie can't deny it. He's not the person he was. Does that mean that he's no longer real?  
He's twenty-five. And six months. A friend of his wants to go to this party in town, but doesn't want to go alone. It's been years since Ritchie was invited to a party, even as a last-resort companion, and he's tickled and curious, so he agrees to go. It takes him less than an hour to get bored of it. He's driving, so he can't really imbibe, and he long-ago learned that in some situations, yes, you do need to drink to have fun. The people he knows he knows only superficially; he doesn't feel right starting conversations with them, or walking into ones they've started. Like a ghost, he goes from room to room until he comes to a bathroom where the light is on and the door is open. There, a blond man is struggling with the child-proof cap on a prescription bottle. It takes him a moment to notice that Ritchie's there, but when he does, he snarls, What are you looking at?  
“You're English,” is all Ritchie can think to say.  
“No shit,” the man sneers, then relaxes his features and asks, “You couldn't open this for us, could you?”  
Ritchie takes the bottle from him and reads the label. “This is for heartburn.”  
“Oh,” says the man, “Ta very much”. He puts the bottle back in the medicine cabinet. This is, Ritchie will soon learn, John Constantine, master of the dark arts.

Ritchie thought he was so smart. That, he can't deny, either. In the stories, one can defeat the devil by being sufficiently pure of heart- which wasn't true- just ask Astra- or by being sufficiently clever. 'Pure of heart' is too ambiguous- 'pure', in what sense?- so Ritchie always depended on being clever. He thought- well, he thought that it was all a matter of mental paraphernalia, information and its correct use. Know the right sigil, the right name, and you'd be fine. It doesn't happen this way in stories. Little girls don't get dragged into hell, and if they do, you can save them. Magic is math, and math is about seeking equality. Equality by any other name is fairness. But it's not fair. No one plays by the rules Ritchie learned. That's what breaks him. Literally and figuratively. If you can't trust information, you can't trust anything, and if you can't trust anything, you might as well  
let go

The doctors have been very understanding, but there are some things they just don't understand. While he's ready and willing to let go, he's not ready to give up. There is a difference. He's not ready to take another leave, like his doctors keep suggesting, or go to more therapy than the required appointments- or, maybe, check himself in someplace where they can give him the attention he needs. They don't understand that he doesn't need to go anywhere. Everything in his life might mark him as a stranger within in, but he's not ready to wave a white handkerchief and say 'Goodbye'.  
From Jenny, he gets his Adderall. She's had a prescription since she was a kid, and though she doesn't need it anymore, she keeps getting it refilled. She says that she thinks of it as a public service. She says that while the drug is of no use to her, she knows that other people like it. She says that she's never tried using it recreationally, that she doesn't even want to. She says that she prefers to get high, not stay up. She says that it's the only way she can relax at the end of the day. She says that she's saving to buy her little sister a car for her sixteenth birthday.  
Ritchie frowns. “Won't your parents wonder where you got the money?”  
Jenny frowns right back. “It's only a used car.”  
It takes him months to figure out how to use his new friend to function. The path to heaven is paved in excess: at first, he overdoes it, spectacularly. He barely eats or sleeps, spends hours in the bathroom with grinding cramps, one end or the other on the toilet. He loses the weight he gained back since leaving the hospital, and his hair falls out in his hands. His heart pounds. He develops a tremor in his hands; he has to get students to mark his papers for him. In the night, as he's finally slipping into a shallow doze, he hears things. Things he both hopes and doesn't hope aren't real.  
People are talking about him. The sound is always at the edge of his hearing, like the sounds at night. He hears 'breakdown', and 'rehab', and sometimes 'junkie', and 'crazy', and 'sick', and once, laughably, 'cancer?' Nothing could be further from the truth. If his physical body is eroding, it's only because his soul has been steadily crumbling.  
Eventually, he learns to do it right, and comes back down to the chemical sea level. People still talk about him, say 'psycho', and 'Tourette's'. 'Sick'. Once 'sick' gets stuck to him, it never comes off. Thankfully, it never gets so serious that his job is in danger, but once he's a little more balanced, it occurs to him how precarious his position could have become. You have to practice moderation. Life is, as certain schools of thought will tell you, a quest to balance elements. Not too much Valium, or he'll walk into a room, have a conversation, and forget what was said as soon as he walks out again. Not too much Adderall or he'll spend a class period huddled in a bundle of shirts and sweaters under his desk, and no one will believe that he just dropped his pen.

People are afraid of physical pain. Even more-so than of psychological pain. Maybe it's because the latter is easily attributable to a personal failing, to weakness or self-indulgence or laziness, if you want to be cruel, and everyone believes they're better than that, but no one is immune to the former. It makes it difficult to talk about with people. Even the doctors and nurses don't like to get too into it. At first, he tries to be charitable, thinking that it might be because they're English, but once he's back home, it's the same thing. In mechanical tones, he's asked to assign to his pain a number, on a scale of one to ten; to describe succinctly its quality. Is it sharp or dull? Is it radiating?  
It's radiant. It's the effulgence of hell, itself. If he goes even a few minutes past the time when he's supposed to get his next dosage of pain medication, it begins creeping into the margins of his consciousness, making cinders of his reality. Taking him back to hell.  
Where he never actually was. Which he never actually saw, because by the time Astra was dragged down, he'd already been thrown back, made contact with a wall or a piece of furniture- no one could say for sure what he hit, but it was hard enough to give him a concussion and bring a swelling to his spinal chord. Most of what he knows comes second-hand, but he's sure that, even unconscious, he was aware of it, felt the heat and smelled the fumes. Sometimes, when the nausea washes over him, he can taste, more as an idea than a memory of something that was in his mouth, a mixture of rare meat and burnt toast. He'll retch, but nothing will come up.  
Ann Marie visits him, with a frequency he starts to find disturbing. A nurse asks if she's his girlfriend; he can't laugh, but he wants to. They don't say much to each other; his voice is too weak, and she, he imagines, is only there out of guilt and self-loathing. Most of the time, she sits quietly, or kneels by his bed, praying. Which apparently, she did constantly, early on, when he was first brought in, unconscious from the shock and then in a chemically-induced coma. Later, Gary comes, laughing nervously and sweating, or strangely silent and settled in a way he never was before. Ritchie's beginning to understand. To understand Gary, because he now understands need.  
John shows up, once. Charms the nurses. Closes the door and opens the window so that he can smoke . This is just another inconvenience for John Constantine, who feels not pain or fear or sorrow or shame, but only annoyance. He makes jokes, laughs at them by himself when Ritchie doesn't, only seems bothered when Ritchie tries and fails to sit up. John takes a step forward, cigarette stuck to his lower lip, hands out, but then remembers himself and steps back. Shakes his head, puts out his cigarette, and leaves the room. He's replaced by a pair of nurses who haul Ritchie up by the sheet on which he lies, and mold him into a sitting position. By now, they know that he's going to be all right. For certain values of 'all right'. Nothing was broken, but he's still going to be in terrible pain for the foreseeable future. It's just pain, though, which you can't see, like a fracture on an X-Ray, or feel, like shattered bone beneath the skin. The nurses are frequently late with his medication, by as much as an hour, leaving him sobbing and breathing heavily alone in his room, rattling like a pit within the rind of fruit long dead and dried. When they appear, it's with an exhalation of peevishness at his frequent calls. For the first time in his life, he wishes suffering on other human beings. Eventually, he's declared stable and able to travel, sent to another hospital; this one, back home.

The medication that preserves him physically wears at his mind. In the dark, when can't sleep, he remembers things. Or, he doesn't remember, exactly, because that implies conscious effort. Whispers of past events come to him, unbidden. They unwind like serpents of smoke, transparent and stifling. He's in the other hospital, the one in the states. They're holding him unjustly, he's sure- he's well, and he needs to go home. How long has he been there? So long that the time is no longer measurable in units of hours or days; it merely is. He has to be allowed to go home. He is going home, if he has to drag himself there. With great effort, he disconnects the monitors, and wriggles out of the mass of plastic-coated wires. That's when the nurse catches him- hot annoyance and cold disdain both heating and freezing her features- and he panics, makes up a lie about feeling feverish. For his trouble, she and another nurse strip him and scrub him furiously with cold water, leave him uncovered as he shivers convulsively until he stutters out that he needs a blanket.  
“I thought you were hot,” sneers one of them.  
But to think of it, now, it doesn't feel like it happened to him. It was another body that was grabbed and pushed and tormented, one he doesn't recognize. Is a person not their body? If it was some unrecognizable, unknown body, it wasn't his, and it didn't happen to him. Why does he remember it, then?  
When he tells his therapist about this, purposely sparing in his detail for reasons he can't identify, she says that she's sure the nurses knew what they were doing, that they would have never hurt him. After that, he decides that he doesn't want to see this particular doctor anymore. The next one is a man; from across the room, Ritchie can smell the cigarette smoke on his jacket. They don't say very much to each other, and Ritchie dislikes therapy slightly less.  
Sometimes, he thinks of Gary, which brings him a weird sort of comfort. It's because Ritchie understands, now. They've both been to the same geographical location, lived there, breathed the air and eaten the food. The taste of the water must still be in Gary's mouth, like it's in Ritchie's, now. They know things about this country that those who haven't been there can't imagine. Is it strange that his new knowledge makes Ritchie feel an awkward kind of pride?

After the second hospital, he gets sent to a rehabilitation center. When he's discharged from there, after so long that he'd resigned himself to never leaving, he gets passed from doctor to doctor. An internist. A surgeon. A pulmonologist. A pain management specialist. A psychologist and a psychiatrist. For his bodily pain, he's given great tablets that look like worn-down stubs of chalk. The medication is meant to be taken every twelve hours, but he takes it every eight. Then, every six. When he runs out- too quickly!- he doesn't dare go to the pharmacy, so he calls up an old acquaintance, spends hours and money on dinner and drinks and a visit to a place called Tail Feathers, and leaves with an address he can visit. The pills he gets there look exactly the same as the ones he was prescribed, which he finds achingly surreal, when he puts one in his hand and lets it shake around the grail of his palm.  
For the other pain, the one that he could easily name but refuses to, he's given a succession of antidepressants with names that could have come from 1950's sci fi. And a cloud-white wafer with a 'V' carved into its center. It makes him think of Superman's emblem. Gradually, he moves up to an identical pill of peachy pale orange, and then, to one of sky-blue. He's sure that his affliction is supernatural in origin. He was touched by something unnatural- even if it was just to be flung aside when he stupidly got in its way. Believing that magic was about equilibrium. Like math. That his value matched that of the thing before him. Philosophically, this might be true. But science, not math, and not philosophy, will tell you that a body will maintain its course only until it meets something greater in mass or energy than itself. Here, philosophy must turn on him, too: hell and its workers are eternal, and Ritchie is a lot of things, but not eternal. One day, he'll decrease in volume as his mass decays and becomes something else. One day, his light will burn out.  
He's become an expert in pain. And hospitals. And their workers. Perversely, he's begun watching a lot of TV shows about the medical profession, because he has oceans of time and not much else to do. If anyone were watching with him, they'd no-doubt find him insufferable, for his endless commentary on the many inaccuracies, but no one watches with him. Experimentally, he tells his physical therapist some of his observations, and gets only a gentle hum in return.

He loves the pills. They keep him alive. Maybe that's not true. It feels like it, though. It takes him a while, but he finds a balance. Adderall gets him up. Sometimes, he almost feels like he used to. Full of life and energy. Sparkling. Perfect. It's not the natural perfection of being young and brilliant, fresh from a happy childhood and untouched by real pain, and having your world crack open and something wonderful spill out. But fake is better than nothing. Anyone who insists otherwise has never had nothing. The Valium brings him down, and it also evens him out. Stills his hands and lowers his heart rate; makes him able to stop speaking in conversation and allow the other person to say something. Sometimes, he feels unspeakably smooth, water-smooth, creamy at the center. Long puffs of laughter escape him, in reference to absolutely nothing; he's sure that he's turning to water and this is just steam escaping. When relief comes, it's first as a happy trickle, dissolving the pain like water would paper, and then as a great flood, and when it's good, it seems impossible to Ritchie that there was ever any pain at all.  
He hates the pills. With a rage so intense it tightens around his bones, frightens him, he misses the dilaudid he was given in the hospital. He misses how it blotted out everything with its warmth and weight, leaving nothing behind. He misses the I.V., misses having something that was both part of his body and not, inside of him but discrete. He thinks of the smell of the rubbing alcohol the nurse used to clean his port before giving him his medication, and sighs to himself. Sometimes, he'll smell rubbing alcohol, and it'll touch him someplace within, dead and dessicated, the mummified seat of desire. He misses it so much. He misses being, even for ten minutes, nothing. Now, he has to do things, be things, because he's still alive, he didn't die, and he's not in hell, so he has to do. To be. The pills are there to aid him. Continue an existence he isn't even sure he wants. He hates the tremors, and the diarrhea, and the tics and paranoia. He hates the memory loss, and the feeling of remoteness, and the nausea; the falling too hard into sleep and missing his alarm, having to explain himself to faces piquant with annoyance, then milky with pity. He hates the times when he'll start crying for no reason and not be able to stop. He hates examining his life, pruning from the tree of his life anything that could trigger a strong negative emotion. He hates cutting off parts of himself. Even the parts that need to go. But they never needed to go, before. He got along. He was whole. He had a life.

He's been very lucky. He knows. It could be so much worse. God knows what it's like for Ann Marie, Gary. John. Ritchie certainly doesn't. The last he saw of any of them was in England. He never told them he was being discharged and sent home; for all they know, he's still there. Waiting for them like the relic waits for the archaeologist.  
He's lucky. He could be much more damaged than he is. He could be dead. He could be in hell. He doesn't feel lucky. He doesn't feel lucky when he wakes in the middle of the night, because the medication isn't working. It feels so cruel. There are times when death is mercy. Is this one of those times? Is his life infernal retribution? Is he being punished, especially, for his especial hubris?  
It was hubris that got him to where he is. He knows. It was the same for all of them: they all believed that they were capable of anything. Anyone who does magic believes this. Your early successes run away with you, and you stop thinking that you're ruled by anything but your desire. Magic changes the world, and even if you never did before, you'll want to change the world. Even if your intentions are good, they'll be, in your mind, the intentions of a merciful god. You don't want to be human anymore; you want to be something else, beyond humanity. You want to know everything. Like God knows everything. You want to remake life in your own image. Whether you want revenge or you just want comfort, you want to make up for the slights and injuries you've suffered.  
And Ritchie? Who had been truly lucky up until then, and happy? A fully-formed person. An adult. A reasonable person. Complete. Whole. Even now, he doesn't know what really made him respond to John's request.  
Yes, he does. It was John, himself; John's need for his presence. Ritchie was necessary. Him! Ritchie had gone his entire life without being truly needed, hadn't realized how much it mattered. Or it mattered so much because it was John. John, who already knew so much, and had done so much, was shaking Ritchie up out of his bookish life, his solitary pursuits, his classes and office hours, asking him to come and play. John, who made matters of life and death seem like naughty fun- dangerous, but such an adventure. This was John's life: he did things like this everyday. Yet- suddenly, he needed Ritchie to be part of it. Somehow, sometime in the past decade, without Ritchie realizing it, this had become important. And John asked him so nicely- to cross the ocean, visit someplace he'd never been, come to know things so far unknown to him. How could Ritchie resist?

John is back in the states. Ritchie wouldn't go so far as to say that he knew it without being told, but he knew that something with a lot of power had crossed an ocean and settled itself not too far from him. He's never been full-on psychic, never been able to do impressive things like Ann Marie- or even Gary, when he worked himself up sufficiently and was on the right kind of drugs. He knows things, though. He feels things. He feels this. It's a bad day. He shakes and sweats through his first class, hands clenching around anything close enough to grab or shaking to such an extent he's sure they'll vibrate into a liquid. At lunch, he goes home, digs up the Tarot cards he hasn't touched in years. No matter how many times he shuffles, the first card he pulls is always the Magician, reversed. He hasn't smoked in years, but he wants a cigarette. His brain doesn't know yet, but his lungs do, and his throat does, and his ruined bones know, too.  
When John shows up in his office, it's like slipping without realizing from waking into a recurring dream. He's been here before. He knows how this goes. He looks around, at the places he put his medications. He pinches his arm, tugs at his hair. He's been here before. This is a country other people have visited, too, but nobody knows it like Ritchie does. When John begins talking, proves himself to be real- real enough to carry on a conversation, anyway- Ritchie realizes that this country has explored him, too. Knows him just as well.


End file.
